Talk:Coeur d'Alene language

Gender in Coeur d'Alene language?

I greatly appreciate the effort the authors of this entry have invested to bring this knowledge to the public! But it is rated as a stub, so there are some things missing. Notably, with such detail on other points of grammar, this article doesn't mention how gender works in the Coeur d'Alene language. With one exception that shows either male or female, all the examples of third person are male, which appears very gender insensitive to me like saying "mankind" to mean human beings. I am very curious to know whether Coeur d'Alene has animate/inanimate gender, such as Anishinaabemowin. I realize these are completely different language families, but it seems possible. It would be wonderful if this article clarified the question of gender in the Coeur d'Alene language! Coryannyyz (talk) 15:50, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi Coryannyyz! I had a quick look through Doaz's grammar of the language and didn't find any reference to different marking for male or female in Coeur d'Alene: third person is just listed as third person, rather than divided into third person masculine and third person feminine. I'm familiar with Salish languages in general and none of the Salish languages I am familiar with make any gender distinctions in their agreement systems. The examples that use male referents, therefore, are likely an unfortunate result of treating masculine gender as the "default" gender, especially common when the grammar was published in 1997.

However, these examples are taken from a source material that lists the translations as male. So, even though the examples could probably be changed to 'he/she' from 'he', that would technically be inaccurate to the source material, which lists them as 'he'. I'm not sure what Wikipedia's policy is on this.

As for animate/inanimate gender marking, this is also not a feature of Coeur D'Alene, although Doaz did mention that that animacy/agency is involved in certain suffixes on verbs. For example, the -m suffix indicates agency, so the sentence *čɛtp̓ɛn̓m xʷɛ slip̓ 'the wood piled itself' is not grammatical. The verb isn't marked for inanimacy/animacy in every case though, so it's not exactly like Anishinaabemowin. The animacy stuff is in a pretty complex part of the grammar about argument structure and I'm not sure if it would be suited to the Wikipedia entry. Brucethemoose98 (talk) 22:44, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Status of Coeur d'Alene

I haven't found anything concrete yet but I've seen some sources that say the last native speaker of Coeur d'Alene died in 2018. My 2022 Ethnologue says there's one remaining speaker and classes it 8b, nearly extinct, and it sources this article. The other speaker it references in that article, Marie Irene Seltice Lowley, has obituaries around the internet that are easy enough to find.

That's all to say, should the status of this language be changed without an official source that states it as extinct, are the obituaries enough? Because everything I've found as of yet calls it critically endangered.
Sharkthecat (talk) 01:09, 21 June 2026 (UTC)